Ah, Sunday dim sum! Jeannette and Henry took us to their favorite dim sum restaurant, a huge place packed with Chinese families. Once again, we relied on Henry to order tasty stuff for us in Cantonese. We were nearly finished with the meal when Jeannette got an evil glint in her eye and asked, "Have you ever tried innards?" Henry looked horrified and said, "You're not really going to make them eat *that,* are you?!?" Feeling cocky from our successful jellyfish experience the night before, I decided we should go for it. So Henry requested the dish from the next waiter who passed by.

I may have finally met my match.

A big bowl of steaming unmentionables arrived at the table, looking and smelling absolutely awful. Undaunted, I grabbed my chopsticks and fished out a piece. It was dark brown, jiggled sickly, and smelled like liver. Oh boy. But it was too late to back down now! As I was fighting to swallow the spongy sticky rubbery liver-tasting wad of revoltingness without gagging it back out all over the table, Henry mentioned casually that "the lung isn't really the most tasty one." Oh, thanks for telling me now! But that meant I had to try another piece to get the "tasty" stuff. God give me strength. I gritted my teeth and dug in for one more bit, Mark now joining me and taking a similar bit in his chopsticks. I tried to get Henry to tell us what it was before we tried eating it, but he opted not to. The second one wasn't nearly as bad as the first... probably some kind of intestine, but it didn't have a very strong taste and was merely rubbery as opposed to spongy *and* rubbery. It still fought back and was tough to swallow, though. There was no actual regurgitation, but it got a battle to the death for a few challenging seconds there. OK, now that we've tried it once (twice, in my case!) I think it's fair to say that I will NEVER eat innards again. Urp.

The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering through Mountain View and visiting the Apple store where I drooled over the iPhone for about an hour. Me want! It's hard to justify purchasing a new shiny toy when I'm unemployed, so I guess it's back to hoping Santa drops one down my chimney by mistake. But they are slick little beauties, no doubt about it. I amused myself by showing Jeannette some Central American pics from this site via the user-friendly zoom tools on the iPhone's browser. So nice.

Back at the house, we played with Hadley and had a nice dinner with the fam before driving up to SFO and checking into our airport hotel in preparation for tomorrow's flight back. So much driving and jumping around is not my preferred way to travel, but it was fun to pack in lots of adventures into one fairly short trip. It was definitely a trip of extremes: from swank beach houses to some-guy's-couch, from French puff pastry to slimy lung bits. It'll actually be nice to get home and slow things down a bit!